Faust Pens New York Times Op-Ed Supporting Humanities Funding

University President Drew G. Faust took to the pages of the New York Times Thursday to lay out an impassioned case for continuing to fund the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal grant-making agency that Faust wrote “nurtures our national soul.”

Last month, President Donald Trump included the NEH and its sister program, the National Endowment for the Arts, on a draft list of programs up for elimination in this year’s federal budget.

In the op-ed, Faust, a historian of the American South, described several projects funded by the NEH, including a wildly popular 1990 Civil War documentary, a cross-country tour of Shakespeare’s First Folio, and the digitization of eight million pages of historic newspapers.

"Reports suggest that the Trump administration’s coming budget will defund the endowment,” Faust wrote. “I would wager that few readers of this newspaper, and probably few Americans anywhere, are untouched by an N.E.H.-sponsored project or program.”